To write about Rimbaud is to embark on a journey along an unkown path, a trip to the impossible center of his poetics: the “Cimmerie”[1]: an underground place where light does not penetrate, and the path to which we will never find. And if by any chance we do find it, it would be unexplainable: this is an ideal spot to begin the risky rimbaudian adventure.
J’étais mûr pour le trépas, et, par une route de dangers, ma faiblesse me menait aux confins du monde et de la Cimmerie, patrie de l’ombre et des tourbillons. (Délires II).
After Rousseau we assume that it is possible either to live or to write, but it is not possible to do both. This paper will attempt to “think” the possibility of doing both things. And three or four things, if necessary.
We have to start from the beginning, then: God. Why is God God and not me?, Rimbaud asks himself. Why are we but at the beginning, but at the end? Nevertheless, Rimbaud finds eternity: the sun fleeing together with the sea. He wants to be that sun and that sea, a utopian union that work humiliates[2] and that will only return when man becomes God again, according to which, obviously, he must die. Newness claims for death, even when the new is the oldest: the beginning. Sacred instant.
In a world without God, without law, not everything obeys chance, anyway. Everything is also institution, ordered imperfection,
des déserts [...] sans routes [...]: Que voulez-vous qu’on vous écrive de là? Qu’on s’ennuie, qu’on s’embête; qu’on s’abrutit; qu’on en a assez, mais qu’on ne peut pas en
finir, etc., etc.! [...][3]
Discriminating deserts of law, deserts where the longed for freedom shines, the ones from which Rimbaud is proscribed, proscription chosen as the only way to wisdom. For example when criticism and the academy dictate norms on how to write, they proscribe him identifying writing with gregariousness and submission: campus domestication. But Rimbaud does not understand laws or norms and, nevertheless, I venture to think that he would have been interested in having a campus experience on which to advance, where to be bored, without roads. Because Rimbaud also rejected the bohemians that he was once associated with:
ces bons’hommes qui ne perdraient pas l’occasion d’une caresse, parasites de la propreté et de la santé de nos femmes, aujourd’hui qu’elles sont si peu d’accord avec nous. (L’impossible).
Our poet emancipates himself from everything, from the laws of reason and verse; he separate the grains:
Petit-Poucet rêveur, j’égrenais dans ma course
Des rimes. (Ma bohème).
What is it about Rimbaud that bothers the institution? Why is he considered a writer for “adolescents”? Welcome your absence, Arthur. You would have been expelled anyway. The omnipresent and mutilated body of your poetry/life upsets New England[4].
Can you imagine Rimbaud answering in an exam?:
Moi je ne puis pas m’expliquer que le mendiant avec ses continuels PATER et AVE MARIA. JE NE SAIS PLUS PARLER!
But as a matter of fact, when he felt like it, we can imagine him answering differently. He was actually a star student of languages, and some of his teachers, like Izambard, were his first “liberators”.
That is also why it is so difficult to “explain” Rimbaud. But that is not what I want to do in this paper. Rimbaud said that his work should be understood “littéralement et dans tous les sens”. And those meanings are not in a dictionary, are not decipherable, it is not possible to “ergoter”[5] them:
Je est un autre. Tant pis pour le bois qui se trouve violon, et Nargue aux inconscients qui ergotent sur ce qu’ils ignorent tout à fait. (Lettre du Voyant à Georges Izambard, 5/13/1871).
The insatiable “besoin d’interpreter”[6] can lead to intelligent academic readings but not to an intellectual and vital relationship with the work. And I suspect that it is this latter type of criticism Rimbaud’s non-work is asking for.
We were talking about God also because Rimbaud’s work/life hearkens back to the mystery of creation, of the “future Vigueur”, tormented by sterility[7], that tries to invent a new eroticism almost magically: alchemistic operation where all the secrets mix to make the “vraie vie” spurt out, distorting all familiarity in art, making one’s life a work of art, a new idiom where words coincide with things again. That is why Rimbaud’s non-work is a work-in-progress, eternal project of a pagan Bible.
Rimbaud is a son of romanticism from which he inherits an erotics and a politics: a way of falling in love, of struggling and traveling that fuses life and poetry. Otherwise, says Rimbaud, we are not in the world, the “true life” is absent. Domesticity or life: it is necessary to chose. Seeing, living, departing. Changing life, inventing life, exploring more vibrant existences through the “alchemie du verbe”.
But his “bateau ivre” escapes from reality in its drunkenness, in its terrible longed for freedom, love that unbalances and raises the boat either to the danger of the air or to the danger of the lack of it: to invent new shapes is to attract the risk[8]. Rimbaud believed in the transforming power of imagination, in its known ingenuity as an unheard-of possibility. His poetry is the desire for this change, of “émouvoir”[9]:
Toutes les possibilités harmoniques et architecturales s’émouvront autour de ton siège. (Vingt Ans)
Les Phénomenès s’émurent (Guerre).
To change poetry/life, to act, to be “un multiplicateur de progrès”[10], to conquer, to attack “à droite, à gauche” (L’éclair), to assault crazily like an adolescent (like that one who is lacking), a stab to the discourse that constitutes us, in a delirium of agitated questions: art as violence and insurrection in the brutal night is what Rimbaud’s knife is aiming at, that, from the outside, is sustaining the savage. Strengths and sweetness:
Nous nous sentions si forts, nous voulions être doux! (Le Forgeron).
Rimbaud’s poetry manages to be in the aesthetic and social avant-garde as a permanent revolution realized by the vainly enraged “maudit supreme”, sometimes turned off as “arbrisseaux brûlés” (Les Premières Communions) and afterwards turned on again, like “âme sentinelle” (L’Éternité) invigorated through waiting.
The excluded Rimbaud also interests us because he was part of the extremist wing of the “Vilains Bonshommes”: the “Zutistes”, those who shun society; he interests us for his “credo in unam” instead of a “credo in unum Deum”; because of his desire for an ardent justice that surpasses in violence that of the first romantics; because of his revolt against the “falots”[11] that intend to point out the direction:
Dix nuits, sans regretter l’oeil niais des falots! (Le Bateau ivre).
Rapidly the metaphysical experience and literature will become a despicable ballast for Rimbaud. In this way his writing will be the writing of rejection, the writing of just a few words to pronounce that rejection: adolescent, lacking writing seeking to abolish itself in the fatality of an unskilled body, resistant to every sublimation and criticism. The disgust with the poetic pride of the “accroupis”[12], whose haughty “bave”[13] falls like meaningless words:
...bavant la foi de sa buche édentée (Châtiment de Tartufe).
Et tous, bavant la foi mendiante et stupide (Les Pauvres à l’église)
...l’ombre bave aux bois comme un mufle de vache (Les Douaniers).
Maintenant, je m’encrapule le plus possible (Lettre à Izambard, 13/5/1871)
and he also gives us the method and aim of this action:
Je me fais cyniquement entretenir; je déterre d’anciens imbéciles de collège: tout ce que
je puis inventer de bête, de sale, de mauvais, en action et en parole. (Lettre a Izambard, 13/5/1871).
Here Rimbaud ruthlessly attacks the useless work of the fake alchemists, the sententious and solemn “prudhommes”, proprietary and courteous professors displaying a juror’s mediocrity who inspire all his disdain, repugnance, contempt, “foin”. Facing this panorama, Rimbaud imposes upon himself the invention of another world, an enthusiastic Rousseaunian ethical impetuosity, epitomized in the following phrase:
Il faut être absolument moderne (Adieu).
And this is an eternal, Sisyphus’s task, to be tried one time and another in every sea, on every shore where it be possible to bear witness to innocence, to catastrophe, to renouncement to the work, as footnotes to an inexistent text or a text to re-invent, as the contemplation of the text/history from its footnotes/personalizations. But if Rimbaud was not a philosopher but a poet, what leads me to make these kinds of observations? Well, the fact that the day in which philosophy and poetry reconcile had also arrived for Rimbaud. And for him that reconciliation implied a going beyond both, faster than both:
Les philosophes: Le monde n’a pas d’âge. L’humanité se déplace, simplement. Vous êtes en Occident, mais libre d’habiter dans votre Orient, quelque ancien qu’il vous le faille, -et d’y habiter bien. Ne soyez pas un vaincu. Philosophes, vous êtes de votre Occident. Mon esprit, prends garde. Pas de partis de salut violents. Excerce-toi! -Ah! la science ne va pas assez vite pour nous! (L’impossible).
Rimbaud hurts both poetry and philosophy in his insensitivity to the conventions of thought and feeling. He hurts them with the tenderness of his surpassed language, with the vigor of his skin. The feeling of the loss of feelings appears as a backlash to sentimentality: Rimbaud incubus of the original, previous to time, divine, back from nature sensibility; rendered transgression, human body, love’s body of his first works, deserts of routinized love only recuperated by cultivating every kind of love, like an angel’s song, furious, born out of sacrifice to grasp the impossible, exposing himself to impossibility, provoking it, without expecting anything from it.
-Ô Vénus, ô Déese!
Je regrette les temps de l’antique jeunesse,
Des satyres lascifs, des faunes animaux,
Dieux qui mordaient d’amour l’écorce des rameaux
Et dans les nénufars baisaient la Nymphe blonde!
Je regrette les temps où la sève du monde,
L’eau du fleuve, le sang rose des arbres verts
Dans les veines de Pan mettaient un univers! (...)
Je regrette les temps de la grande Cybèle
Qu’on disait parcourir, gigantesquement belle
Sur un grand char d’airain, les splendides cités;
Son double sein versait dans les immensités
Le pur ruissellement de la vie infinie.
L’Homme sucai, heureux, sa mamelle bénie,
Comme un petit enfant, jouant sur ses genoux.
-Parce qu’il était fort, l’Homme était chaste et doux. (Soleil et chair).
Love’s lost innocence, lost romanticism, enchanted world that we re-invent when we are overflowing with lifeblood, when we want to do something so as not to surrender that easily to the implacable order of what is given, admitted, indisputable. If passion is useless, does that mean that we have to eliminate passion for the benefit of productivity, for a life of utilitarian efficiency?:
...ma vie était un festin où s’ouvraient tous les coeurs...(Une saison en enfer,
Preface)
and that left him deadly drained, stole his heart, deprived him of love in his endeavour to invent another love, another heart on fire. Love comes from fire, the origin of the new day. The attempt to invent a new eroticism, a new passion in the fusion of life and poetry, cries less for a critical explanation than for a passionate reflection on the way in which criticism faces life and poetry. This can be a reason for the resistance to it, because it exasperates like a revolting adolescent in a classroom, reviling every previously defined methodology, every bureaucracy of thought, every peace of mind. And the only way to deal with this adolescent, with Rimbaud, is inventing a new virginity for ourselves every five seconds.[16]
Rimbaud’s way of singing has nothing of a romantic melody. It is rather an accusing raspy voice, a strike to the eardrum that silences instead of deafening: Poetry has to lose its voice to find it again, it has to exile its voice to Africa, to orality, again, in the “livre negre” where the word...falls in the voice of silence, a language of absence answering the overwhelming romantic presence, presence needed in order to create that absence afterwards. This is, we have to remember, a game for two...or three or four.
The silenced voice implies the erasing of the authority of the I for the benefit of a stronger will, the future surrealist sacrifice to reach beyond, to surrender to the fact that we do not belong to ourselves; and the attempts to defy constantly that condition with the freedom that we do not have: a total rebellion without weapons, a desperate rejection of our lack of freedom as the only possible “freedom”: the surrender of the self of writing, of the self of living, into the possibility of an unwritten writing and a dead life. After all, writing does not write and life does not live: aporetic delights.
Rimbaud detests every banality of the I, of writing and life, the future of sordid and goodthinking everydayness in families “des soins naïfs” and2 des bons travaux abrutissants” (Les Premières Communions) that he will predict in another poem to his “petites amoureuses”:
Vous crèverez en Dieu, bâtées
D’ignobles soins! (Mes petites amoreuses).
The saint, like the murderer who is only seen by the victim, is the only one who can bear witness to himself, the only one that keeps himself out of the farce, sometimes horribly.
And facing murder, religion, reason, he chooses the adventure, not to grow old in the compay of savages or imbeciles, in life or poetry. But going brutish is unavoidable...to the extent of desiring to pursue it, so that it not to be the one to take possession of him. And then Rimbaud set out to look for the hell of the “barbarie moderne,” a world of conformity and slavery: rimbaudian journey as an experience of the “atroce”.
And this odyssey, we insist, is not only a two-way street, but three or four, aimless, like a “bateau ivre”, like an errant sensibility crossing indefatigable bridges, with the calm that only shipwrecks and the infinite, the water and the wind give, in
la grande route par tous les temps, sobre surnaturellement, plus désintéressé que le meilleur des mendiants.. (L’impossible).
Rimbaud’s poetry can be read as the story of the shipwreck in writing, of the writing of the
“piéton de la grand’route” (Enfance, IV), and the perplexities that this poetry generates seem to me more important than any complete comprehension of them. Departing and departure’s writings, displacements, askew discoveries of the impossibility of departing:
On ne part pas (Mauvais sang).
An exiled departure, then: wanderings around the dreamed city, negated and recuperated departure as a souvenir of what was once dreamed, of what could have been, the adventure in spite of the horror, with the horror that allows to yearn weaknesses: fragile gypsy wandering through the labyrinths of the world in a body-boat, without a helm, departing and remaining at the same time:
Assez vu. La vision s’est rencontrée à tous les airs.
Assez eu. Rumeurs des villes, le soir, et au soleil, et toujours.
Asses connu. Les arrêts de la vie. -Ô Rumeurs et Visions!
Départ dans l’affection et le bruit neufs! (Départ).
Trembling anchored boats ready to go, the moment you see the beloved for the last time, the indecision to take or not to take the train. Rimbaud set out to discover a divine image and once he has departed, there was no possibility of return. He presses forward like an hadj[17], in his imagination-boat to flee, from the miserable to the divine, inventing a new path, a new bridge, a new poetry to conquer life and writing, and three or four more things...Departures and returns. Meetings and farewells of a fleeting reality.
The moment of the impossible departure is a provisory intemporality where eternity is reached:
Elle est retrouvée.
Quoi? –L’Éternité.
C’est la mer allée
Avec le soleil. (L’Éternité).
It is possible to feel the desire to stop the flow of time, to seize the ephemeral in Rimbaud’s poetry : fleeting smile, time as plague:
“Change nos lots, crible les fléaux, à commencer par le temps”, te chantent ces enfants (A une raison).
It is possible to derive from the preceding the necessity of a reason without the constraints of space and time:
Arrivée de toujours, qui t’en iras partout (A une raison).
End of time, that great murderer; genesis of the civilization of the time murderers, bloody souls revolting to found a new imminent time, the time of future poetry, illusion where only what is not, is; expectations as the most vivid, the best, the scratched remains of the desperate that
languissent après l’orage, l’ivresse et les blessures (Jeunesse, Dimanche).
It is impossible to be in the world in this way unless we sacrifice ourselves by entertaining the impossible. Rimbaud cannot be absolutely modern but by ceasing to be, diseasing, deceasing. But it is impossible to die if death is real and the real is the impossible[18]. Rimbaud is a work in progress, an invitation to disdain, to the immediateness of a photography of a vertigo:
J’écrivais des silences, des nuits, je notais l’inexprimable.Je fixais des vertiges (Alchimie du verbe).
Vertigo of not knowing what it is being done, chimerical vertigo of renouncement, Rimbaud reading vertigo, the whirlwind of God’s voice remembered in an instant. Vertigo of a dance that is a temporary soothing of the need to flee and the sacred joy of rhythm:
Plus de mots. J’ensevelis les morts dans mon ventre. Cris, tambours, danse, danse, danse, danse! [...] Faim, soif, cris, danse, danse, danse, danse! (Mauvais Sang).
Frenzy of the rhythm that is “fureur” and “mystère”, struck sonority, crazy game of high and low notes looking for the absolute sound of language:
Des accords mineurs se croisent, et filent, des cordes montent des berges (Les ponts).
Rimbaud’s dance is also part of his will to give body to poetry, something that an idealistic esthetics had always tried to avoid. We find a dancing writing in Rimbaud, a musical and corporeal writing. And the adventure is also the search of bodily sensations: the fatigue and the sun on the skin. That is why the end of Rimbaud as a cripple is a capital irony[19].
Rimbaud does not let us choose life or writing, he does not let us explain, he disorients us, he obliges us to escape with him, he kidnaps us. Nothing saves this writing from its absurdity, then (on the other hand, this is perhaps the only reason to write it). We can also inscribe it inside a tradition of criticism, inspired by Rimbaud, that we could call “indeterminacy criticism” (to be known also in the vilifying circles that we will not be absent as “absurd criticism”). And if we dare to practice such a thing, with such a presumptuousness, is because in the very end we know that we are not inventing anything new, we are only repeating, once more, an eternal gesture that must be re-embarked upon.
These writings/lives offer and will offer broken thoughts, incoherent rhythms, remains of bursts, cutaneous eruptions, terrible hallucinatory tempests, Bretonnian collapses of the intellect, intense immoderations, combustions of disillussioned wizards, tensions, excesses, overflowed failures.
Rimbaud invites us to jump beyond our tired possibilities, but warnes us against all kind of religious or philosophical trascendency or any kind of intellectual hubris: “outrer”, “robinsonner”.
Rimbaud abuses of the word “tout” in his poems. Two is not enough. He needs an infinite series of possibilities: 3, 4, 5, 6.... His frustration derives from this. So do his emotions and our emotional reading of him. Hence, his “Je m’en fous” . Thus, my “ce que ca dit, litteralement et dans tous les sens”.
Arthur Rimbaud, je vous suis “superbondé de gratitude”.
Yale, 12-14-1996
[1] According to Claude Jeancolas in Le Dictionnaire Rimbaud, the Cimmerie is a mythic county situated in the confines of the world, haloed with clouds and mist, encircled by an eternal night because daylight never penetrated there. The “cimmériens”, its inhabitants, suppossedly have a strange and barbarous behaviour, immolators of human sacrifices, living in the undergrounds. Nobody ever having found the way to the Cimmerie, it was imagined close to hell or in the land of the dead.
[3] Correspondance, Oeuvres complètes, “Pléiade”, p. 611., quoted in Anne-Emmannuelle Berger: Le banquet de Rimbaud. Recherches sur l’oralité.
[4] Where the rimbaudian desire of inventing a language is realized: P.C., poor consolation, but at least allows us to imagine Rimbaud’s impossible language as a kind of opposite to these hypocritical euphemisms.
[5] In Dictionnaire Rimbaud this verb is described as the action of arguing through syllogism, inveterate practice in schools. An attempt to explain with absurd arguments. Some critics also construe the use of this word as an evocation of the cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” to which Rimbaud was not particularly akin, coherent with his project of annihilation of the I.
[6] See Manonni: Clefs pour l’imaginaire, Le Seuil.
[7] See Henry Miller, The time of the Assassins.
[8] Risk the critic rarely takes, who, generally, reifies and knows only about dealing with dead, classified, frameable things, but not with life. But would the critic who took the risk still be the critic?
[9] According to the Dictionnaire Rimbaud , this word is used by Rimbaud in its first meaning: from latin emovere , to make move to another place, to put into movement, to move. To agitate in terms of physical effects. To excite.
[10] Carta a Paul Demeny, 5-15-1871.
[11] Naval term, among others abounding in Rimbaud. Lantern on the sailboat in the highest peak of the stern of the ship.
[12] Mediocre beings living a vegetative, banal life without dreams.
[13] The word shows up thirteen times in Rimbaud’s poetry. In Dictionnaire Rimbaud it also appears to be “sad sperm”.
[14] Figuratively, stupid, incapable of appreciating the beauties of nature, incapable of understanding and loving (DiccionaireRimbaud).
[15] Word coined by Rimbaud, meaning “to become crapule”.
[16] As Oliverio Girondo, an avant-garde Argentinian poet, used to say in a poem.
[17] Title acquired by muslims who have made the pilgrimage to the Meca. From the Arabic chàddji: pilgrim.
[18] Thought developed by Maurice Blanchot in L’écriture du désastre.
[19] This reminds me of Borges celebrating God’s magnificent irony in giving him both books and the night at the same time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bandelier, Danielle. Se dire et se taire. Neuchatel: Bacconiere, 1988.
Berger, Anne-Emmannuelle. Le banquet de Rimbaud. Recherches sur loralité. Seyssel-Champ Vallon: Diffusion, 1992.
Blanchot, Maurice. L’écriture du désastre. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.
The infinite conversation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Brunel, Pierre. Arthur Rimbaud ou l’éclatant desastre. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, Paris: Diffusion, Presses Universitaires de France, 1991.
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De Graaf, Daniel. Arthur Rimbaud sa vie, son oeuvre. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1960.
Friedrich, Hugo. The structure of modern poetry. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1974.
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Greer Cohn, Robert. The poetry of Rimbaud. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Jeancolas, Claude. Le dictionnaire Rimbaud. Paris: Balland, 1991.
Lapeyre, Paule. Le vertige de Rimbaud. Clé d’une perception poetique. Laussane: Diffusion Payot, 1981.
Miller, Henry. The time of the assassins. New York: New Directions, 1962.
Perloff, Marjorie. The poetics of indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism. London: Methuen, 1970.
Richard, Jean-Pierre. Poésie et profondeur. Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1955.
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